Silver and Cold
by Tolakasa
Summary: AU. Mary’s family was a mystery. An investigation into a secretive community leads Dean and Sam to answers, but the consequences might be more than they can handle. Sequel to In This Town.
1. The Article

Same universe as stories "In This Town" and "Chiseled in Stone."

AU for season 3.

* * *

**The Article**

The article Sam ripped out of a magazine in a hospital waiting room didn't say much, just that there was some kind of closed community deep in the Appalachians, on a spot near the intersection of three state borders. It implied that they were Amish-like—in the sense of being isolated for religious reasons, not in the sense of being primitive, as one photo showed a very modern-looking computer lab—but that wasn't what had made him tear it out of the magazine (to the glaring disapproval of a seven-year-old waiting for X-rays). Sam's sharp eyes picked out unmistakable signs of old-school witchcraft in the accompanying photos.

_Very_ old-school. Things that hadn't been seen in _Europe_ in centuries, let alone in North America. Things only _hinted_ at in the oldest books.

A little digging—a _very_ little digging—uncovered the area's more colorful history: acrid dry fogs like smoke that settled on the local towns for days and often killed newborns and those with breathing problems; mysterious pillars of flame on the mountainsides; storms that went from pouring rain to hail to snow and back to rain in a matter of _minutes_, and in all seasons—all dating as far back as there were records, and all unexplained. Then there were the more minor things: local legends about secretive clans of witches, failed attempts at ethnological studies, an inability to pin the closed community to any specific cultural heritage, and a complete and total lack of intermarriage. Anybody who married into the community _stayed_ in the community.

That was weird enough to kick Sam into full-fledged research mode, which only dug up more weirdness.

Before the age of child services, the community had taken in abandoned and orphaned children, like the Shakers had; it had not been uncommon for mountain families with too many mouths to feed to turn over their youngest—_always_ the youngest, infants and toddlers, never children old enough to really remember anything. Very rarely an adult went in, usually a man and usually to marry one of the community women, but none of those adults ever came back out. If the numbers had been higher, if those adults hadn't remained in written contact with their families, the group would be on half a dozen cult watchlists.

Nobody ran from the group, either, which was just damned weird. No matter how controlling a cult got, no matter how strictly a group isolated itself, _somebody_ always managed to leave. But _these _guys were so good that nobody was even sure what they called themselves. (The less-polite term bandied about by the locals was "witchfolk." The more PC of the neighboring towns referred to them geographically, the "people in Sister Valley.")

In the old days, when they still participated enough in society to allow their young men to be drafted, invariably one or two decided to stay outside. They didn't talk.

They also tended to spontaneously combust. One in Chicago in 1867, a guy who had spent the last days of the Civil War in a prison camp; one or two after every war since. Ten during Vietnam. In 1975, the community had registered itself, _en masse_, as conscientious objectors.

Four mountains hemmed in the community—the Four Sisters, which in a freak of geography aligned perfectly with the compass points. Three towns in three states formed the "normal" border, all of which were apparently named for those mountains: Blood Sister, Green Sister, Night Sister. (The fourth and tallest was Snow Sister, which was apparently not special enough to have its own town.)

None of this was enough to make Dean want the job, even if Sam was having geekboy fits about it. He was way more interested in a possible ghost ship on Lake Michigan. Not to mention, Michigan was closer.

No, what caught his eye—and his attention—was a photo on a website Sam found, an anti-witchfolk site run by someone in Blood Sister. This guy hated everything about his neighbors, from their isolation (only bad people need privacy) to their cars (mainly Fords) to their clothes (normal enough) to their audacity in visiting government offices (how dare they). It was obvious to the webmaster that deviants like them should be banned from renting post office boxes.

It was obvious to Dean that this guy needed a life.

The website required a lot of skepticism, which was why Dean quickly gave up reading the venomous text that accompanied the "surveillance" photos that this idiot posted. Any time one of the witchfolk came into town, this guy and his cronies apparently lined the route, cameras and cellphones at the ready. By the tolerant smiles of the witchfolk in question, Dean suspected they were not only fully aware of their stalkers, but found the whole thing amusing.

But one of the pictures caught his eye, that of a man carting Amazon packages out of the post office. More specifically, it was the man's ring that caught Dean's attention, a wide silver band like only one Dean had ever seen.

Sam, thankfully, was too absorbed in trying to track down a lineage for those symbols to notice. The rings were easy to overlook; they were plain, easily mistaken for wedding bands.

That was why Dean wore his on the right hand, so no one made that mistake.

He was able to identify seven different people—five men, two women—who wore identical rings. Four on the left hand, three on the right. More importantly, there were several—er—witchfolk in the pictures who didn't wear rings at all. _Most_ of them didn't.

Which made the rings special.

Which made _his_ ring special.

Dean didn't know how he knew, what detail had triggered his subconscious to make the link. He just knew that those silver rings had something to do with his.

But when Sam asked, he muttered something about ghost boats not being as much fun as they were rumored to be, and didn't even argue about the longer drive.


	2. Night Sister

**Night Sister**

Night Sister was the largest of the towns, having the virtue of being within sight—if you stood at the town limits and squinted _really_ hard—of an interstate. It also sounded the most interesting.

It turned out to be just another small mountain town, still too small for the corporate influences of McDonald's and Wal-Mart. The main street (which was actually "Mountain View," not "Main") housed a handful of small restaurants, a few obnoxiously quaint antique shops, and the town's single motel. The one bar was also a decent little restaurant, and it was conveniently next to the motel.

Granted, Night Sister was so small that everything was pretty close to everything else. Dean hated to think how tiny Blood Sister and Green Sister were. He wondered if they even rated stoplights.

"So, I found a map," Sam said, around a mouthful of something that involved way too much greenery to be considered actual food. "Roads are questionable, though."

"Usually are in a place like this." The roads, maybe, but not the food; this steak was near perfect. And cheap, considering. To think, he'd been worried about the lack of fast food. "Think we'll have any problems?"

"Driving there? No. Getting in?" Sam shrugged. "Maybe. That article didn't mention their position on gun control. And there's this." Sam turned the laptop so Dean could see the screen. He'd been committing acts of spreadsheet again. "Those killer fogs?" He pointed to a column of dates. "They correspond almost exactly to the pillars of fire." He indicated a second column. "And _those_ correspond _exactly_ to the spontaneous combustions of the runaways." A third.

Sam was really going over the limit with this one. Pointing that out, however, would just ruin his mood, and probably send him back to moping over the deal and how to break it. The exuberance was a nice change, and Dean wasn't about to risk it. "Not all of them," Dean pointed out, opting for professionalism instead.

"But the fogs without fires still correspond to the spontaneous combustions! So maybe the fires were just where they couldn't be seen from outside!"

"Dude, calm down," Dean said, laughing. "I haven't seen you this excited over a case in—hell, ever. What's gotten into you?"

"These are _ancient_ European witch marks," Sam said, probably with no idea of just how much like an overly-enthused and slightly-inebriated grad student he sounded. "Finding them _here_— Dean, this is beyond hunting, this is _archaeology!_ This is the kind of discovery that would have Indiana Jones drooling!"

"Sure, Dr. Jackson, whatever." Sam gave him a blank look. "Didn't you ever watch TV at college?" Dean tossed back a French fry. "It's probably just some of those, whaddyacallems. Celtic reconstructionists—"

"They're not Celtic!" Sam said, backing up the words by stabbing his salad (_more_ greenery, geesh) viciously with his fork.

_And what did that poor tomato ever do to you?_ "There's all kinds of pagan groups out there now, dragging up all kind of shit they should know better than to mess with—"

"Not this," Sam said emphatically. "These symbols are the kinds of things only serious scholars know about."

Dean shook his head, grinning. "You're hopeless, Sammy."

"_Dean_—"

Dean held up his hands in mock surrender. "I get it, I get it! It's a big deal! Just spare me any details I don't need to do the job, okay?"

Sam gave him a sharp look. "You're humoring me, aren't you?"

"I'm awesome that way."

"Jerk."

"Bitch. Here, eat some junk food before your system goes into shock." He reached to drop some fries onto Sam's plate, and his arm hit Sam's glass and sent it flying into Sam's lap. "Oops."

"_Dean!_" Sam grabbed a napkin and tried to mop up the mess. "Dammit, this was my last clean shirt!"

"It was an accident!"

"Yeah, right." Sam sounded completely unconvinced. "You can pay for laundry this week."

"Will you quit spouting random Hebrew if—" Sam threw a balled-up napkin at him and headed for the bathroom. "It wasn't _that_ bad," Dean muttered, but Sam was out of range, so Dean applied himself to the rest of his steak.

He was just finishing when a voice snarled "Hey."

Dean looked up from his plate to see three burly locals, reeking of redneck, glaring down at him. He'd seen them at the bar earlier, been aware of the nasty looks shot his way, but when they hadn't done anything but nurse their beers and glare, he'd pushed them to the back of his mind. They must have been waiting for Sam to leave. "Yeah?"

The man in the lead grabbed his hand and damn near jerked his arm out of the socket. "This is a witchy ring," he finally rumbled. "You one of the witchfolk?"

"I'm not even sure what a 'witchfolk' is," Dean answered, pulling his arm free. "My brother and I are just passing through on our way to—"

"Only witchfolk wear these rings," the man persisted. "So you gotta be—"

"My girlfriend gave it to me," Dean lied smoothly.

"Then why're you wearing it on the right?" one of the other rednecks asked.

"Because she's my girlfriend, not my wife." Dean glanced around at the other patrons. Most were keeping their eyes carefully on their plates; a handful were watching suspiciously. Those would probably take the rednecks' side, which put the odds at ten to one, not three to one. Great. Just _wonderful_.

It wasn't that he minded a good barfight, it was just that he was used to doing _something_ to provoke it first. Something other than _breathing_, anyway. And finding out about the ring was too important to risk getting tossed out of town. "I don't want any trouble—"

The lead redneck grabbed him by the collar and pulled him halfway out of the booth. "You were in for trouble when you came to town," he snarled. Dean flinched. He'd met corpses that smelled better than this guy's breath. "This is _our_ town! You can't keep comin' in like you own the place an' not 'spect us to protest!"

"Sure thing." It was extremely hard to talk and not inhale. "What did I do?"

"You're one of _them!_ You're fuckin' _unAmerican!_ You people are the reason we—"

"Troy!" The bartender's yell was followed by the unmistakable sound of a pump-action shotgun. "Leave them alone!"

"But he's—"

"Ain't none of your business _what_ he is, it's my place and I'll have who I want in here! Now get!"

Troy gave him a sullen glare and let go of Dean. Dean managed to catch himself so that he didn't land on the table, but just barely. They were _definitely_ going to have to do laundry. "You just watch yourself, witchy man," Troy growled and stalked off, his buddies in tow, just as Sam came out of the bathroom.

"Dean, you okay?" Sam asked. He shot a confused look at Troy's back. "What happened?"

"Oh, you missed all the fun." Dean rubbed the back of his neck. "Apparently I'm one of the 'witchfolk' now, whatever that means."

"How—" Dean held up his hand. "I don't—"

"Some of them wear rings like this." Sam frowned. "Those guys didn't exactly have an eye for detail." He glanced around; they were getting double the suspicious looks now. "If you're done, let's go."

"Okay." Sam packed up the laptop.

The bartender, who was also manning the register, waved away Dean's credit card. "Least I can do for Troy's meanness," he said.

"We couldn't," Sam began, "really—"

"Don't be insulting my hospitality, boy." All the friendliness was gone from the bartender's voice, and the look he shot Sam was murderous. Dean raised an eyebrow. Usually people were instantly hostile to _him_; those puppy-dog eyes tended to give Sam an annoying and instantaneous trust-me aura. "Just because the Valley people tolerate your kind don't mean I do." Sam blinked. "You better not come back in here."

"His kind?" Dean asked.

"You want to meet locals for a night, _stac'he_, fine, just not in my bar. Get enough trouble from the church as it is for selling booze."

"But—I—we—we're not—"

"Speech impediment," Dean interrupted, giving Sam a sharp elbow in the ribs. "Makes him sound way dumber than he is. Thanks for the meal. C'mon, Sammy." He steered Sam out the door before anybody _else_ started in on them. "That was weird."

"No kidding." Sam shot a confused look over his shoulder as they walked towards the motel. "Did I just get gay-bashed?"

"It was bound to happen eventually." That earned him a punch in the arm. "What?"

"Smartass."

"One of us has to be. Did that sound familiar to you?"

"What?"

"That word the bartender said." He racked his brain for it. "_Stac'he?_ Was that it? You ever hear that?"

"No." Sam gave him a look. "Should I?"

"Not at all?"

"It wasn't Latin, Spanish, or French, and it didn't sound like Greek or Hebrew."

"Sam, could you _not_ be geekboy right now?" He unlocked the door to their room.

"Sorry, I thought when you asked the question you actually wanted an answer." Sam closed the door behind them, and reached for the salt to fix the lines. "What's gotten into you?"

"Nothing," Dean said. "Just— I swear I've heard that word before. _Stac'he_."

"Then what does it mean?"

"I didn't say I knew what it meant, just that I'd heard it before." He collapsed onto his bed.

"Maybe in Dad's journal?"

"Not read. _Heard_. I _know_ I've heard it."

Sam gave him a long look. "Dean, you're not making any sense."

"You think I don't _know_ that?" Dean snapped. "This whole job— Something's not right."

"What?"

"If I knew, I'd tell you! It—it just—" He stopped. "What if I told you that it made me think of Mom? Way back before you were born? Something so far back I can barely remember that I remember it?"

"Mom," Sam repeated. Dean wondered if he'd stared at Sammy that way when Sam told him about the visions. "But Mom was from Kansas. Like Dad. Wasn't she?"

"Far as I know, but hell, I was only four. I barely knew where _I_ was from. Dad never said anything, but— Sammy, what if _he_ didn't know?"

"You mean, something Mom never told him."

Dean nodded. "Yeah. Something like that."

Sam sat down, very slowly. "I think," he said finally, quietly, "that we need to go to Sister Valley."


End file.
